Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

‘French painting is painting, and that’s all there is to it.’ Twenty-five years ago this proposition could have passed almost anywhere in the world as a universal truth. Artists who were at that time members of the Ecole de Paris (and active members, be it remembered, not simply revered survivors) included Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse, Rouault, Bonnard, Vuillard, Segonzac, Derain, Dufy and Delaunay. Paris was the headquarters of Chagall and Kandinsky. Klee’s dealer was Kahnweiler. With modern art ostracized in Germany and Italy, non-existent in Spain, under-capitalized in Belgium and Holland and largely ignored in Great Britain, there was no rival to Paris either in volume and quality of production or in the skill and assiduity with which that production was marketed. The day of American nationalism was yet to come; and Paris, which had fostered the best art in the world without interruption since the death of Tiepolo in 1770 and of Goya in 1828, seemed to most people to have taken over for ever from Athens and Florence and Venice and Rome as the world’s capital of the arts.

     Nobody who knew Paris at that time will ever forget the ease, the informality, the unaffectedness of the world in which the existence of the big men was taken for granted. Cahiers d’Art, Minotaure, and Verve were not full of subsidized articles or concealed puffs for artists who had nothing to recommend them but an unnamed financial interest; there was more than enough to make these periodicals of continuous and lasting fascination. Artists were still private individuals: and although, here and there, the image of the poète maudit persisted, the veteran stalwarts of the Ecole de Paris were, apart from everything else, colossal and regular workers. The life and death of Wols were to prove that Paris could still be a hard place for the unrecognized artist; but in general it was what it claimed to be — a city that gave of its best and got the best in return.

     Paris is still, of course, a beautiful and amenable city, and the apparatus of art is even more in evidence than it was in 1935. There are more dealers’ galleries than ever: more, perhaps, than have ever been open in one city anywhere in the world. The prestige of art remains very high: nowhere, certainly, does the mere fact of being a painter carry with it such an assurance of friendly consideration. Life is less easy than it was thirty, forty, fifty years ago and the pas de porte of an authentic, old-style atelier d’artiste will run certainly into four, possibly into five, figures sterling. But, to balance this, a young painter who has any success at all will jump immediately into the kind of price-range which, in the 19305, was the reward of twenty or thirty years of applauded effort. (Prices in Paris are fixed on a mathematical basis, according to size, and without regard for variations of quality.)

     He will benefit, moreover, by the newly-evolved dealer-artist relationship which is, in its way, one of the most remarkable psychological constructions of the last fifteen years. The basis of this construction is the contract, by which the artist receives a guaranteed income in return, as a rule, for a stipulated number of canvases. Clearly, such an arrangement is open to abuse; the temptation to reproduce en série, or at the last possible moment, has not always been resisted, any more than has the possibility of disposing of one or two particularly good pictures on the side. Such transgressions, when discovered, give rise to scenes as painful, and as violent, as any of those traditional in, or near, the alcove. In consequence it is now understood in Paris that the only contracts worth entering into are those which go far beyond the undertakings prescribed on the papier timbré. The dealer who means to get on, in the Paris of 1961, must reckon to do practically everything for his artists except brush their teeth and do up their shoes. He must be estate-agent, decorator, employment-agency, resident psychoanalyst, sea-lawyer, chauffeur, maquereau, literary adviser, social secretary, handyman, investment-counsellor, impresario and scribe. By turns Prospero and Caliban, Figaro and Almaviva, Sancho Panza and long-shanked Quixote, the dedicated dealer of this new, resourceful sort is likely to be under forty; he will not have known at first hand, that is to say, any era in art-dealing but the one of which he is a part. It has made him, and he has made it; and the curious thing is that both he and it have flourished almost, but not quite, independently of the merits of the works of art which have been on offer.

     This statement wants qualifying, of course: but it remains broadly true that Paris has not for a long time been a place in which works of art are sold strictly on their merits. Perhaps, indeed, there never has been such a place, for the purchase of a work of art is an infinitely complex operation — and one in which the work of art itself is sometimes almost forgotten, so manifold are the auxiliary motives engaged. Certain it is, in any case, that in art, as in clothes, scent, wine and food, Paris is still believed by a large public to set the pace. When very great works of art were being produced in Paris — between 1907 and 1915, for instance — that same public, or its equivalent, detested, where it did not ignore, those same works of art; and if, now, it sees its mistake, it is not because it likes the pictures any better, but because it knows that they are worth a great deal of money. Money is what people care about: and it is because modern art is known to involve big money that the art-world of Paris, and of other big cities, has swollen to its present proportions. It is possible for an artist to survive — Giacometti, for one, has done so — but to be proof against corruption requires an altogether exceptional strength of character.

     Since 1945 the Parisian art-world has had to deal with two radical changes of circumstance: an enormous increase in the demand for works of art, and a falling-off, hardly less great, in the supply of works of art of the top class. In 1939 it was possible to put on, without undue exertion, a show of twenty-five watercolours by Cézanne; it was also possible for more than half of that show to remain unsold. Today it would cost two years and the best part of half-a-million pounds to assemble the pictures, and the whole lot could be sold by telephone, if need be, before ever the show opened. Nor is it simply that nearly all the great men are dead, and that there is therefore a known limit to their production. Many of the finest pictures of the last sixty years are destined for, or already in, public
collections. Those which may still come on the market may well come up in New York, or London, or Zurich, rather than in Paris. Whether or not London is ‘the centre of the world’s art-market’ can be argued, but London is certainly the centre of the world’s auction-market; and when it comes to private dealing Paris has no longer her old primacy in the handling of French pictures. Once again, the reasons are manifold: but the trend is one which, if not arrested, will make it no more essential to look in Paris for Matisse or Bonnard than it is to look in Venice for Titian or in Amsterdam for Rembrandt.

     All this means that, if the Ecole de Paris were no longer to produce artists of the first order, the Parisian art-world might gradually grind to a halt. For every painter of consequence in Paris there are probably fifty people, if not a hundred, who live off him — not directly (the figure in that case would be nearer ten or fifteen) but in the sense that his activity, his power to attract clients, and the mysterious glow which he casts over his environment serve to buoy up other painters. Thus, quite apart from the dealers, critics, touts, publishers, magazine proprietors, photographers, printers, caterers, frame-makers, paint and canvas merchants, landlords, bill-stickers, doormen, secretaries and others who live on the art-world, hundreds of other painters are kept going in the hope that one of them will prove to be the Dubuffet, the Fautrier, the Poliakoff, the Ubac or the Lanskoy of 1965. A dealer, like a publisher, has to carry people in whom he has a faith that the public has not yet requited: and although art is not, as some people suppose, ‘a lottery’ it looks sufficiently like one, from the outside, for a great many people to put money into it.

     Not all of this money, by any means, is laid out on the kind of painting with which we are concerned here. In Paris, as elsewhere, there is a very large market for bad painting. There are also a great many cardboard-army galleries: places, that is to say, in which almost anyone can ‘have a show’, at a price. The total number of galleries in Paris is, I believe, between four and five hundred; but the number which can be seriously recommended as likely to have at any time new work of serious interest is — how many? Well, estimates vary: some severe judges would put it at eight or ten, others, more lenient, at twenty or twenty-five. In this count one would exclude places like the Galerie Louise Leiris, which has the exclusivity of Picasso, and the Galerie Maeght, which has the exclusivity of Braque; such places are of great fascination and they often have marvellous things to show, but they are more like Swiss banks, in tone, than like dealers whose career is at stake with each exhibition. Certain great houses of the past, like Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune, have a slumbrous grandeur which has nothing to do with post-war art; and although the Galerie Charpentier has, on occasion, very beautiful exhibitions, I do not see why any dealer should charge eight shillings for admission when his no less distinguished neighbours let us in for nothing. I exclude those many houses whose speciality is the ‘painterly’, watered-down variant of the heroes of thirty and forty years ago: and I anathematize, in particular, the one who advertises on these lines: ‘A Matisse which cost 50 frs in 1905 is now worth 50 million anciens francs. Get in on the ground-floor this time and buy young Monsieur Pied-de-Porc before it’s too late. . . .’ Then there are the galleries whose cardboard army marches under cover of heavy artillery: ‘Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Léger, de Stael’ you will see on the posters; but when you get inside, these masters are represented by trifles promoted from the studio floor. Gallery manners are, however, agreeably nonchalant: you will be taken for an unserious idler unless you actually draw a cheque-book from your pocket, and in many cases the gallery will be apparently unattended, with no more than a half-open door and a volume of the Série Noire to suggest that a custodian may, after all, be on hand. Arrivals and departures are, therefore, more informal than is usually the case in London; to that extent, the legend that art is at home in Paris can certainly be upheld, for there is never the feeling, so common elsewhere, of a break in continuity when we pass from street to gallery and back again.

     No two people would agree exactly in their short list of the galleries in which one might hope to find the painter who is now where Dubuffet was in 1942, or de Stael in 1949. In such matters news is best sought by word of mouth, on arrival; but, without claiming that these names represent more than a part of the ideal total, I suggest that you will have very bad luck if you go to the following galleries and do not find in one or other of them something of great interest: Jeanne Bucher, Claude Bernard, Daniel Cordier, Stadler, Karl Flinker, Denise René, Galerie de France, Jacques Dubourg, Henriette Gomès, Paul Facchetti, Iris Clert, Galerie J. But modern-art dealing, unlike old-master dealing, is not a profession in which one normally gets better and better with age: it is nearer to athletics or motor-racing, in that it demands an immediacy of response, an instinctive feeling for the new situation, and a quality of sheer nerve — attributes not often maintained indefinitely at top pitch. It follows that advice in this context tends to be, by its very nature, out of date.

     There are, for instance, a number of youngish and reasonably well-known painters in Paris who have given in completely to the system. But more is likely to be heard, in the long run, of those who regard that system with a holy loathing. The contract, the monthly cheque, the connections with New York, Milan, Frankfurt and London, the subsidized monograph, the production so carefully banked in an air-conditioned vault, the appearances in Venice, Kassel and Sao Paulo, the artificial prices at auction — all these are part of a process which, though undoubtedly preferable in many respects to the poverty endured by Renoir and Pissarro, is likely to destroy more talents, in the end, than it nurtures. But it is a process which cannot be halted. It would have to go on, in any case, because the machinery of promotion and distribution is too powerful, and has been too costly, to be dismantled; and it has to go on all the more, in the 1960s, because Paris has now powerful rivals, themselves no less heavily capitalized, who are bent, politely or not, on her destruction.

     That it should be possible even to speak of the supersession of Paris — or of its relegation to a role comparable to that of, say, Florence in 1850 — is due to pressures both outward and inward. The attack from without is too obvious to need much examination here; it amounts, briefly, to an attempt on the part of England, Germany, Switzerland and the USA (alphabetical order only) to suggest that the most significant post-war achievement in art has been outside the orbit of the Ecole de Paris. Linked with this, whether designedly or not, is an attempt by Germano-American historians and critics to play down the purely French contribution to ancient modern art (1890-1939, i.e) in favour of initiators whose origin was east or north of the Rhine: Kandinsky, Klee, Munch, Malevich, Tatlin, Kirchner, Mondrian, Nolde, Kokoschka, Jawlensky, Schwitters. The movement of opinion extends even farther back in time — as may be seen, for instance, in the Council of Europe’s ‘Sources du XXème Siècle’ exhibition and the Penguin History of Art’s volume on Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1780-1880 by Dr Franz Novotny.

     This outward pressure is not to be underrated in any of its particulars. It has an arguable case, it has some very good heads to argue it, it has a formidable promotional apparatus in the USA, and it has, there and elsewhere, some massive investments of capital. It is not foolish enough to proceed by frontal attack: nowhere is it suggested, for instance, that the artists named in my first paragraph are not as good as people once thought they were. It simply proceeds from verifiable fact: that the dominant influence on young artists throughout the world is not that of the Third Republican Ecole de Paris. And its procedures are the more effective in that they are very well organized and financed, whereas the French riposte, when it can be distinguished at all, has often neither of these characteristics. France remains, after all, an authentic stronghold of individualism. Official policy is assumed to be bad policy by most French people, and at international exhibitions the official French contribution is often so erratic as to deprive the artists involved of all chance of success.

     Still more serious are the divisions within French artistic opinion. In themselves an often admirable mark of independence, they are a great handicap in the 1960s, where it is as essential in art as in politics to have a policy and stick to it. People may complain, and often do, that the Museum of Modern Art and the British Council are ‘narrow’ or ‘sectarian’ in their promotions; but at least these organizations have projected upon an indifferent, incredulous or hostile world a recognizable image of American and British art. France has never done this; and, until lately, has never needed to do so. The great men who were born between 1867 (Bonnard) and 1882 (Braque) took their place in a world in which French painting reigned unchallenged; and a world, too, in which opinion matured slowly, and could be shaped by two or three people over a period of years. The elaborate public-relations apparatus of today’s artworld would have seemed to them both grotesque and injurious; the hand-kept vine had its parallel, then, in art. (Today, the pre-cooked and frozen vegetable would make the apter counterpart to most of what is put on for a short-run success.)

     The main obstacle to the vindiction of Paris, in these conditions, is not so much a shortage of good painters as reliance upon Third Republican patterns of thought. No city which can boast of Braque, Villon, Masson, Giacometti, Poliakoff, Vieira da Silva, Dubuffet, Soulages, Balthus, Appel, Hartung, Magnelli, Ubac and Dumitrescu need make anything but a very good showing abroad. Paris has still the qualities of the ville d’accueil (Malraux’s phrase); and the fact that Max Ernst, Calder, Riopelle, Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, S. W. Hayter, Mortensen, Hundertwasser, Paul Jenkins, Rodrigo Moynihan and John Napper are at home there is proof that those qualities still operate. There is a case, too complex to be gone into here, for saying that the influence of Paris upon the new American and the new Spanish painting is far greater than has so far been acknowledged. Parisians like to say, and may be right in doing so, that it was Ernst who gave Pollock the idea of the drip and Masson who gave him his flickering, high-tension line; that Tapiès was formed as much by residence in Paris as by anything else; and that, in general, many of today’s master-cooks have dipped a spoon on the sly into the Parisian stew-pot.

     But this opinion remains disorganized. Paris cannot accept the fact that what was once avant-garde art is now official art. To the British Council, Bacon and ‘Beowulf’ butter the same piece of bread. To the USIS, a pocket flash-lamp cast in bronze by Rauschenberg not only counts for as much as Nathaniel Hawthorne, but it counts for as much of the same sort of thing. French official opinion has not yet come round to this notion. Nor do French dealers submit as amiably as their British and American colleagues to the idea that names can be made and unmade by official action. For this reason a place is often found in the official French envoi for painters who would seem, to a disinterested eye, to have got stuck in the machinery of a Parisian career. It must be remembered, too, that although, in this country, it is perfectly admissible to see the point of both Herman and Heath, there are still places in which abstract art is regarded by a large section of the public as, if not actually immoral, at best a short-lived hoax. In Paris a painter like Chapelain-Midy can still be put forward in a serious journal as a valid alternative to art autre; and, anxious as the French are for a resurgence of la gloire, there are many people who would rather not have it at all than have it under a flag of which they do not approve.

     If we grant that Third Republican art is now as much a part of history as the art of the Grand Siècle or the Napoleonic era, there is still a great deal for Paris to boast of. It can be maintained, for instance, that Braque’s late ‘Ateliers’ are among the most beautiful pictures ever painted by a Frenchman. Paris invented European art autre, brought it out in 1945, disdained perhaps to force it on the world’s notice by post-war public-relations methods, and saw its initial impact diffused, annexed, counter-claimed, softened and forgotten. Paris has still a tradition of paintings produced with an aristocratic disregard for what others are doing: Poliakoff, Balthus, Giacometti, Vieira da Silva and, among younger painters, Sergio de Castro exemplify this. Paris has produced the painter who, of all the post-war grandees, best personifies the idea of a specifically Parisian genius: Dubuffet. Paris is, in my opinion, hampered by the claims of those who, in former times, would have formed an acceptable corps of craftsmanlike secondary painters, but who today serve merely to confuse the public: Manessier, Pignon, Bazaine are examples of these. The fact is, in this connection, that the ‘painterly’ heritage of Paris, so much admired and coveted over the last fifty years, is now regarded as a burden and a curse by most of those whose task it is to renew French painting. Such is the acceleration, in today’s conditions, of the vie des styles that the preoccupations of 1939 seem as distant as those of J.-L. David or Greuze. Paris is going through, but would never admit to, a crisis of self-confidence in which the very abundance of her immediate past is a source of horror and dismay. The present system is, after all, the one which, allied to certain private distresses, drove Nicolas de Stael to suicide and, in so doing, destroyed the most gifted stranger to have appeared on the Parisian scene since the arrival, in 1906, of Juan Gris. The memory of de Stael, the lost captain, hovers over Paris like a continual and undiminishing reproach; and in the city which forfeited de Stael, Mathieu and Buffet and Yves Klein are held in high esteem. Paris has too long been gorged with art, and with the money that art brings; and although there are people, with financial or emotional interests in the matter, who believe that they have only to hold on for the world to turn backwards, history shows rather that what follows the new thing is not the old thing, but the next new thing. Paris will never regain its position by trying to make Lesieur look as good as Bonnard, or Lapicque as good as fauve Derain; these are panic measures. Her position in art is like her position in literature: people have been overborne too long by French art, just as they have been too long subject to the great names of French literature. Colonial nations rebel, in the end: a generation has arisen which knows the value of Picasso, Braque and Matisse but can’t bear to hear any more about them, just as there are writers who see the point of Claudel, Gide and Valéry but could never conceive of being ‘influenced’ by them. For the Parisian this is a painful but not a mortal predicament: other painters, other writers, other composers are at hand. Paris has an immediate past so luxuriant that one can well understand the Parisian’s reluctance to leave it. But leave it he must: that day is done.